The Cerebellum: Brain for an Implicit Self

Book Description

Leading neuroscientist Dr. Masao Ito
advances a detailed and fascinating view of what the cerebellum
contributes to brain function. The cerebellum has been seen
as primarily involved in coordination of body movement control,
facilitating the learning of motor skills such as those involved in
walking, riding a bicycle, or playing a piano. The cerebellum is
now viewed as an assembly of numerous neuronal machine modules,
each of which provides an implicit learning capability to various
types of motor control. The cerebellum enables us to unconsciously
learn motor skills through practice by forming internal models
simulating control system properties of the body parts.

Based on these remarkable advances in our
understanding of motor control mechanisms of the cerebellum, Ito
presents a still larger view of the cerebellum as serving a higher
level of brain functions beyond movements, including the implicit
part of the thought and cognitive processes that manipulate
knowledge. Ito extends his investigation of the cerebellum to
discuss neural processes that may be involved implicitly in such
complex mental actions as having an intuition, imagination,
hallucination, or delusion.